It is very rare to see any vendor publishing a benchmark on competing products of their own let alone products that are 100% compatible with each other. Well, it happened at Oracle|Sun. M-series and T-series hardware was the subject of two similar / comparable benchmarks; and PeopleSoft Financials 9.0 DIL was the benchmarked workload.

The benchmark workload simulated Financial Control and Reporting business processes that a customer typically performs when closing their books at period end. "Closing the books" generally involves Journal generation, editing & posting; General Ledger allocations, summary & consolidations and reporting in GL. The applications that were involved in this process are: General Ledger, Asset Management, Cash Management, Expenses, Payables and Receivables.

The benchmark execution simulated the processing required for closing the books (background batch processes) along with some online concurrent transaction activity by 1000 end users.

Summary of Benchmark Test Results

The following table summarizes the test results of the "close the books" business processes. For the online transaction response times, check the benchmark reports (too many transactions to summarize here). Feel free to draw your own conclusions.

As of this writing no other vendor published any benchmark result with PeopleSoft Financials 9.0 workload.

(If the following table is illegible, click here for cleaner copy of test results.)

It is one of the complex and stressful benchmarks that I have ever been involved in. It is a collaborative effort from different teams within Oracle Corporation. A sincere thanks to the PeopleSoft benchmark team for providing adequate support throughout the execution of the benchmark and for the swift validation of benchmark results numerous times (yes, "numerous" - it is not a typo.)